Collapse of Rotating White Dwarfs and Multimessenger Signals

Abstract

We present results of numerical relativity simulations for the collapse of rotating magnetized white dwarfs (WDs) in three dimension, aiming at discussing the explosion dynamics and associate multi-messenger signals: gravitational waves (GWs), neutrinos, and electromagnetic counterparts. All WDs initiate gravitational collapse due to electron captures and then experience prompt type explosions after the proto neutron star formation. We observe the explosions dominated by a bipolar structure and the emergence of strong spiral waves in rapidly rotating models. The spiral waves facilitate to increase both the explosion energy and ejecta mass, though the final values still fall in the category of low explosion energy supernovae with small ejecta mass. The spiral waves also produce strong GWs, which may expand the horizon distance of such events against GWs up to ~10 Mpc for third-generation ground-based detectors. Additionally as an intriguing implication, we demonstrate that such accretion or merger induced collapse of WDs might be able to explain some of the rapidly evolving optical transients, such as fast blue optical transients (FBOTs), as previously suggested. Based on the simulation results together with several assumptions, we confirm that the magnetar may account for the brighter side of some of observed FBOTs, while a combination of ejecta-envelope interaction which can be also followed by radioactive decay of heavy elements synthesized along with the explosion might still explain the fainter branch even in the absence of magnetar formation.